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Monday, March 25, 2013

How do you Know Which Parts of the Bible are Inspired?

....The Great theologians of the twentieth century, Barth, Baultmann, and Emil Burnner saw revelation as a dialectical encounter. God is mystery and reveals himself though soterilogical encounter in a dialectic between the reader and text. In other words, we get the drift from reading text but we can't necessarily say which part is "inspired."[1] In terms of Biblical inspiration this means the Bible is not the word of God per se, but contains the word of God. This has often led to the question, "how do we know which parts are inspired? Not
a matter of Parts. You can't dissect a narrative line by line and ask
"what parts of this narrative are the result of the writer's genius and
what parts are just banal filler?" You can criticize different aspects
of course, but you can't say 'this sentence is genius and this
sentence is not a product of genius." The whole narrative works
together to create a solid word. Narratives communicate in many subtle
says. you can't limit the number of insights one can deduce from a work
of art....Fundamentalists look at the Bible in a certain way and
atheists look at it in reaction the fundamentalist way. The basic
assumption is made by both that the text of the Bible is, from the "In
the Beginning" of Genesis to the "even so come quickly Lord Jesus" of
Revelation as words transmitted from God to the mind of the authors. As
though Moses sits down, takes pen in hand and a lights shines on him
and a voice in his head says (in a booming echo like way) "write write
write, this is is...."In in in The the ther beginning ing beginning
beginning...." I don't think it works that way. I am willing to
understand that when the prophets say "this is what the Lord says" they
may be repeating word for word the exact verbiage God gave them to
say, although not necessarily. But for most of the Bible I doubt that
it works that way. I think people were just using the ideas that came
to them as a result of their religious experinces, and as a result they
used those concepts and feelings in the different ways that it
occurred to them to use such material. They put their ideas of God into
the stories and those who had real experinces really captured the
nature of God's grace, and those who did not genuinely experince God
failed to capture such things.....The real problem is the model.
The model of the fundies says that God is writing a memo. The Bible is
the word form "the Big man upstairs" and just like an executive writing
a memo. Moses is taking dictation. But that model assumes directly
handed down verbiage, it's even called "verbal plenary" meaning "all
the verbiage is inspired." That's the model I use. I go by a model that
views the Bible as a collection of writings which are based upon human
encounters with the divine. People experience God in different ways,
usually beyond words; to speak about that they must call up from the
deep recesses of their spirits (minds) that intangible part that
produces art and literature, and they formulate into words their
experinces. That means they have to load the experince into cultural
constructs.;;;;A cultural construct is an idea that is suggested by
culture, by association with other people in society and the symbols
and analogies and metaphors that tacitly speak to us at a level we
understand but can't necessarily articulate. In the ancient world life
was cheap, people were used to thinking in terms of either wiping out
the other guy or being wiped out. The ancient Hebrews magnified their
culture, but a romanticized view of themselves and their struggles into
narrative form and used that framework to express the wordless sense of
the numinous that they experienced through contact with God. The
tendency to want to wipe out other people, to destroy totally every
trace of their existence and lives, is part of the cultural constructs
which act as a lens to give words to the writer's deep and hidden senses
of God communicated through wordless sensations on the mystical level.
So they build into the narrative a bunch of stuff about wiping these
guys and those guys but what we need to understand is the major point
being made.....For example, in the bit about the Amalekites, I'm
pretty sure the bit about the infants is added in latter. I think we see
real evdience in the text that it's been tweaked. But the real point
is not wipe out the Amalekites nor is it that it's ok for us to wipe
our enemies, the real point is obey God. Saul didn't obey God and the
incident was a down fall for him. Now it doesn't matter that the
incident is this failure to wipe out the infants it could have been
anything. They wrote it like that. The real point is do whatever God
tells you to do. But that God is not going to tell us to wipe out our
enemies and destroy their kids is pretty obvious to most of us. We can
defend that description well enough to say "God did not command this."
We can even put it up to religious experince. My experinces of God tell
me God doesn't want this. But why did the author of that part of the
Bible (presumably Samuel) think that God did tell him that? Because he's
filtering the experince through his cultural constructs.....Now
you might ask "but then how can we learn moral truths? Our moral
understanding is not static. Our understanding evolves over time. The
ancient Hebrews could not understand this was wrong because it was
common place in their day. We understand the wrong of it because culture
evolves. Jesus understood it was wrong. Jesus did not say "wipe out
the Amalekties" he said "turn the other cheek." He even corrected the
understanding of the OT generations when he said "you have heard it said
an eye a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you turn the other cheek."
With the Bible we do not proof text. We don't determine what to do by
one verse. We use the preponderance of the evidence, meaning everything
we can understand about the Bible. We don't stop there, we study and
understand what others have said about it. We use the words of the
saints and the great theolgoians as precedents and bench marks to help
us interpret. Samuel was not speaking with authority for all time in
telling that story. He was merely telling a story he heard soem someone
and putting down on paper some tradition (probably the real author was
writing from Babylon in the exile--that's the most heavily redacted
part of the Bible). He was putting into the work his understanding of
God from his experinces as well what he had been taught. But the end
result is a narrative and like all narratives it only works to
accomplish its task when we try to understand it as a narrative and not
force it into molds where it doesn't fit such as memo from the boss,
military communique, or auto owner's manual.....It doesn't
make sense to say "this is inspired and this isn't." That would be like
saying "which feet of Elliot's The Wasteland are good poetry and which
aren't. You can't segment things in that way. We need to understand the
bible as literature. It's major function is to bestow grace upon the
reader. you read it to be healed to find spiritual edification and to
understand God's laws. There are those who think it should be read like
an instruction Manuel for a car. They seem to think it's going to tell
us ever move to make in the same way that the owner's Manuel tells us
how to change the oil. Since the Bible is a collection of different
works written over a long period of time it doesn't make sense to try
and fit the whole collection into one model and understand it all in
the same way.....We don't have to understand exactly the role of
inspiration nor do we need to look for the inspired parts as opposed to
the banal parts. What we need to do is understand the over all
preponderance of teaching and weigh that in light of what God shows us
in our own lives. When we do this grace is bestowed, we are healed, we
are drawn closer to God but we do not have to relate to it as if we are
reading the instructions to change the oil in the car.

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